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Importing Documents as Attachments

Data Sync has many uses and if you are already integrating with Dynamics 365 (CRM) then you can quickly import documents as attachments into your Dynamics environment in a few steps.

The following page will show you an example of how you can import files from your file systems into the attachments entity in Dynamics and link these to a corresponding account.

Import Docs as Attachments

Requirements​

Before getting started you need to ensure you have the following:

Connect to your Source Data​

The following example is using the file explorer as the source and assumes you have your files arranged into folders. Where the folder name is the name of the account that you want to link the file to.

Folder Structure

To get started you need to open Data Sync and connect your source to your file system. To do this open the connection window and go to File System > Files, then click onto the ellipsis in the path field to browse for your folders.

Connect File System

Then click Connect to add the connection.

Create the Metadata Columns​

In order to pass the file data to Dynamics this needs to be in the format of a Base64 encoded string. With Data Sync this can be converted using calculated columns and a simple expression.

caution

Don't forget to escape the backslashes in the path otherwise your expression will not work

TOBASE64(System.IO.File.ReadAllBytes("C:\\Users\\Rebecca\\Documents\\ExampleData\\Documents\\" + FullFileName))

Convert Document to Base64

We also need to include an Object ID Type Code of account, as we will be returning the id of the account objects that are specified in the path to link the documents to each account. This can be done with another calculated column where we just return the string account.

Return Object ID Type Code

Connect your target to Dynamics​

Next you need to connect your target to the annotation entity of your Dynamics site. As you have already pre-configured your connection and saved this to the connection library you can simply expand your connection and right click on the annotation entity and select Connect to Target (B).

Connect to Dynamics

Lookup Account​

You then need to lookup the account name in the account entity of Dynamics using calculated columns. The expression we use for this is:

LOOKUPB("accountid", "account", KV("name", Path))

This will lookup the account id in the account entity when the account name matches the folder name in the path.

Lookup Account

Configure the Schema Map​

Now add the columns to the schema map and map them to their corresponding column in Dynamics. Make sure to set the composite key columns so that the records will return as unique. In this example we use FileName and the lookup column we created in calculated columns titled objectid.

The schema map should then look similar to:

Mapping

Compare and Sync​

Now run the compare by clicking onto the Run Compare button in the toolbar and preview the results.

As we are adding documents we can see that we have 1 document to add to Dynamics by clicking onto the add item in the results list. If we were updating an existing attachment document then this would show in the update item.

info

Please note that deletes are disabled by default but will still show in the results if the record is not present in the source system.

To enable deletes please set EnableDeletes to True in the target connection properties.

Enable Deletes

Results

If the data is presenting as expected then you can synchronise the results. To do this click Synchronise and then Start to begin the sync.

Your documents will now be added to Dynamics as attachments to each account specified.

Dynamics Results